"Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 18 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province."
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"Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom."
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"We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down."
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"The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past."
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"A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all."
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"The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness."
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"The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer."
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"the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself."
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"The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias."
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"Passion paralyzes good taste."
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"Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable."
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"By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is."
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"...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies."
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"The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions."
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"The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured."
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"I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about."
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"Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings."
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"Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples."
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"Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently."
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